ABSTRACT
Empathy refers to the nature of psychoanalytic observation, addresses the scientific revolution of our century and the struggles that go into such a revolution. Eloquently illustrating the polarizing tensions in the word 'empathy', Gail Reed tells of the opposition between science and art or science and mysticism. The issues of parental versus analytic failures and corrections, the ambiguities of empathy's developmental and clinical usage, have been sharply intertwined within the new theory of self psychology. Freud's landmark shift from the seduction to the fantasy theory of neurosogenesis marked the application to clinical inquiry of the essential unknowability of objective reality-the 'synchronization' of inner and outer, so that each person's view can only reflect his own psychic reality, our sole psychoanalytic domain. Unlike most of our clinical and theoretical terms, which retain their meaning, even if ambiguous, as words specific to psychoanalytic language, the same word 'empathy' describes an aspect of everyday human relations and a scientific modality.
